Cultural Literature

Dutch and English settlers brought the first enslaved people to New Jersey in the seventeenth century. By the time of the Revolutionary War, slavery was an established practice on labor-intensive farms throughout what became known as the Garden State...

Published to critical acclaim in 1959 and long out of print, Crusader Without Violence was the first biography of the dynamic leader who emerged from the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott as the spokesman of the twentieth-century American civil rights...

A 2021 Books All Georgians Should Read Georgia Center for the Book Selection "Inspiring reading for aspiring journalists and students of civil rights." -- Kirkus Reviews Wanda Smalls Lloyd's Coming Full Circle: From Jim Crow to Journalism--with a...

Blighted is a powerful narrative about the decades-long decay and remarkable two-year reinvention of Summerdale, an aging apartment community located in one of Atlanta's grittiest corridors. From burnt-out, mold-infested buildings to traumatized...

Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its public school system in 1959 in massive resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board decision of 1954. The editorial pages of the local family-owned newspaper, The Farmville Herald, led the...

The Baltimore African-American community, with its well-known personalities and cultural contributions have made the town what it is today.Throughout the years, the city of Baltimore has played host to many well-known figures, including Louis Armstrong,...

The author of the magisterial A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers now approaches the great singers and their greatest work in an innovative and revelatory way: through considering their finest albums, which is the format in which this...

'. . . we need this book. Of course Africa needs it as well, because no other huge area of the planet is treated as such a singular region, and that has to change. But the rest of the planet needs It's a Continent because we miss out by not recognising...

On a chilly December afternoon in 1975, Bernard Whitehurst Jr., a 33-year-old father of four, was mistaken for a robbery suspect by Montgomery, Alabama, police officers. A brief foot chase ensued, and it ended with one of the pursuing officers shooting...

In To a Young Jazz Musician, the renowned jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize--winning composer Wynton Marsalis gives us an invaluable guide to making good music-and to leading a good life.Writing from the road "between the bus ride, the sound check, and...

Toussaint L'Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, in which slaves rebelled against their masters and established the first black republic. In this collection of his writings and speeches, former Haitian...

The Tuskegee Land Utilization Project is an important part of Macon County's past in the Black Belt of Alabama. African-American sharecroppers and tenant farmers were barely surviving in the poorest of conditions on land so worn out, it could no longer...